Providing particular services over a wireless communication network (e.g. Wimax or 3GPP LTE (Long Term Evolution)/SAE (System Architecture Evolution), for instance providing IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) related services, requires that corresponding Quality-of-Service (QoS) requests be relayed from an element of a wireless core network (also referred to a Connectivity Service Network—CSN) generally referred to as Policy Decision Function (PDF) to an Access Network Gateway (ASN-GW, also referred to as Wireless Access Controller—WAC) and further to a particular base station of the wireless communication network under the coverage of which the end terminal is currently located.
Nowadays, end terminals are usually devised in the form of mobile stations or user equipment which are free to move and may therefore change location from base station to base station which may furthermore entail changing the WAC. Consequently, a solution is needed which allows notifying the PDF to which WAC QoS requests for a particular end terminal should be addressed.
Prior art solutions rely on specifying a dedicated new interface between WAC and PDF for forwarding dedicated messages which indicate a current terminal location (terminal location update) each time an end terminal changes from one WAC to another. These prior art solutions suffer from the inherent disadvantages of requiring the costly definition of a new interface which furthermore creates a mobility-dependent feature in the CSN/IMS core of the wireless communication network which reduces operational flexibility.